The Captives | Page 7

bed and slept
instantly. On waking next morning she was aware that it was a most
beautiful winter's day and that there was something strange in the air.
There came to her then very slowly a sense of her father. She saw him
on the one side, persistently as she had found him in his room, strange,
shapeless, with a crumpled face and a dirty beard that seemed to be
more dead than the rest of him. On the other side she saw him as she
had found him in the first days of her consciousness of the world.
He must have been "jolly" then, large and strong, laughing often,
tossing her, she remembered, to the ceiling, his beard jet-black and his
eyebrows bushy and overhanging. Once that vigour, afterwards this
horror. She shook away from her last vision of him but it returned again
and again, hanging about her over her shoulder like an ill-omened
messenger. And all the life between seemed to be suddenly wiped away
as a sponge wipes figures off a slate. After the death of her mother she
had made the best of her circumstances. There had been many days
when life had been unpleasant, and in the last year, as his miserliness
had grown upon him, his ill-temper at any fancied extravagance had
been almost that of an insane man, but Maggie knew very little of the
affairs of other men and it seemed to her that every one had some
disadvantage with which to grapple. She did not pretend to care for her
father, she was very lonely because the villagers hated him, but she had
always made the best of everything because she had never had an

intimate friend to tell her that that was a foolish thing to do.
It was indeed marvellous how isolated her life had been; she knew
simply nothing about the world at all.
She could not pretend that she was sorry that her father had died; and
yet she missed him because she knew very well that she was now no
one's business, that she was utterly and absolutely alone in the universe.
It might be said that she could not be utterly alone when she had her
Uncle Mathew, but, although she was ignorant of life, she knew her
Uncle Mathew . . . Nevertheless, he did something to remove the sharp
alarm of her sudden isolation. Upon the day after her father's death he
was at his very best, his kindest, and most gentle. He was rather
pathetic, having drunk nothing out of respect to the occasion; he felt,
somewhere deep down in him, a persistent exaltation that his brother
Charles was dead, but he knew that it was not decent to allow this
feeling to conquer him and he was truly anxious to protect and comfort
his niece so well as he was able. Early in the afternoon he suggested
that they should go for a walk. Everything necessary had been done. An
answer to their telegram had been received from his sister Anne that
she could not leave London until that night but would arrive at Clinton
St. Mary station at half-past nine to-morrow morning. That would be in
good time for the funeral, a ceremony that was to be conducted by the
Rev. Tom Trefusis, the sporting vicar of Cator Hill, the neighbouring
parish.
The house now was empty and silent. They must escape from that
figure, now decent, clean, and solemn, lying upon the bed upstairs.
Mathew took his niece by the hand and said:
"My dear, a little fresh air is the thing for both of us. It will cheer you
up."
So they went out for a walk together. Maggie knew, with a deep and
intimate experience, every lane and road within twenty miles' radius of
St. Dreot's, There was the high-road that went through Gator Hill to
Clinton and then to Polwint; here were the paths across the fields to
Lucent, the lanes that led to the valley of the Lisp, all the paths like

spiders' webs through Rothin Wood, from whose curve you could see
Polchester, grey and white, with its red-brown roofs and the spires of
the Cathedral thrusting like pointing fingers into the heaven. It was the
Polchester View that she chose to-day, but as they started through the
deep lanes down the St. Dreot's hill she was startled and disturbed by
the strange aspect which everything wore to her. She had not as yet
realised the great shock her father's death had been; she was exhausted,
spiritually and physically, in spite of the deep sleep of the night before.
The form and shape of the world was a little strained and fantastic, the
colours uncertain, now vivid, now vanishing, the familiar trees, hedges,
clouds, screens,